Tag: book reviews

Book of the Week, cozy crime, first in series

Book of the Week: Buried in a Good Book

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It’s only a couple of weeks since I did a recommendsday post of First books in mystery series, and here I am today back with a BotW post for another first book in a cozy mystery series. Who could have predicted it…

In Buried in a Good Book, thriller writer Tess has taken her daughter to spend the summer at her grandfather’s cabin in the woods. Tess is telling Gertie that it’s because a summer without wifi will do them both good, but really she’s trying to take Gertie’s mind off the fact that her father, Tess’s ex-husband hasn’t been in contact with Gertie for months. But soon after they arrive, there’s an explosion and fish guts start raining down on them but also a human arm. Tess is suddenly part of a real life murder mystery, rather than writing one – and the detective investigating is the spitting image of the hero of her books, a fact he’s not best pleased about.

This was my first book by Tamara Berry and it was a really nice read for a winter weekend. The mystery is more complicated than you expect and it’s got a nice sense of humour about it too – Tess can’t turn her writer brain off and she knows it’s ridiculous to be caught up in a real life murder and that she’s not helping herself. I read a couple of books last week where the amateur sleuth really wound me up, but Tess was such a great break from that. I liked the group of secondary characters that were being set up too – and the small town setting has enough detail that it doesn’t feel like a cliche. I was really pleased to see that there are already a couple more in the series and I may already have acquired book two…

I read this on Kindle, but it’s also available on Kobo (although more expensive than Kindle) and in paperback with a different cover and at a frankly ridiculous price on Amazon at time of writing although it reckons there is only one copy next so who knows.

Happy Reading!

Book of the Week, detective, first in series, Forgotten books

Book of the Week: Death in High Heels

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You know I seriously picking Romantic Comedy as BotW again – but I decided that that would be too cheaty even for me. But I did listen to Curtis Sittenfeld’s novel about a writer on a show that’s definitely not Saturday Night Live on audiobook last week and it’s still a delight, even if I didn’t love the way the narrator did the male voices. But it remains my favourite novel that includes the pandemic in it and I thoroughly recommend it. But like I say, I didn’t pick it again. I just put all the links in…

Instead I have a pretty newly released British Library Crime Classic, and another Christianna Brand murder mystery – this time it’s her debut, Death in High Heels. This features a murder at Christopher et Cie, a dress shop of the most superior kind, where the murderer must be one of five young women who work there. Our detective is a young and somewhat susceptible Inspector Charlesworth, who is trying to untangle the murder.

I do like a workplace mystery, especially where you learn something about how things used to be done. Murder Must Advertise where Wimsey is employed at an advertising agency is brilliant for this – with print blocks, art studios and runners, and Death in High Heels also has vanished details about how clothing shops used to be done – with things like women employed as mannequins to demonstrate how the outfits look to clients, and a staff lunch service. The introduction to this BLCC edition says that (like Dorothy L Sayers and her time in advertising) Brand took inspiration from her own spell working in a shop selling cookers to write this. As I said, this is Brand’s debut, and it’s not as good as Green for Danger or Tour de Force but it still makes for an interesting read, even if Charlesworth goes off down a lot of wrong paths and seems to stumble upon the solution.

This is in Kindle Unlimited at the moment, so if you’re a subscriber to that, it’s definitely worth it. That also means that it’s not on Kobo at the moment. But if you want it in paperback, the British Library’s shop are doing three for two on their fiction at the moment, and I’ve recommended enough previous BLCC books that hopefully you can find two more to make the three – I’ve linked to various others I’ve written about throughout this, but some others that were BotWs are: Not to Be Taken, Tea on Sunday, The Ten Teacups, The Man Who Didn’t Fly, The Theft of the Iron Dogs and The Belting Inheritance.

Happy Reading

Book of the Week, cozy crime, detective, reviews

Book of the Week: Buffalo West Wing

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As I said yesterday, most of my reading last week was to contribute to this year’s fifty states challenge and this was one of them. It’s slightly rule breaking but I’m going with it.

Buffalo West Wing is the fourth in Julie Hyzy’s White House Chef mystery series featuring Olivia Paras, who (as the title suggests) is the executive chef at the White House. In this, a new president has just been elected and that means big changes for the staff at the Residence. It also means Olivia needs to impress the new President and his family, but when some mystery chicken wings turn up in her kitchen, she gets off on the wrong foot with them because refuses to serve them to the First Kids. But when the people who do eat them fall ill, she’s caught up in a plot to threaten the First Family.

This is the first in this series that I’ve read (or even come across) and it had slightly more peril than I was expecting and also a lot of pre existing relationships to get my head around. But there was info there (and not in info dumps) that it made sense and I really enjoyed it. I would happily read more of the series.

I read this one in paperback as you can seem but as it’s nearly 15 years old (and the series has been dormant since 2016) they may not be that easy to find in physical copies. In fact I’m amazed I found this one in Waterstones a couple of months ago. But they are all available on Kindle and Kobo.

Happy Reading!

book round-ups, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: October Quick Reviews

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It’s the first Wednesday of the months and I have quick reviews for you – and one of them is even a new release! Two days in a row! Yes, it can happen! I’m almost proud of me. Except for the fact that the rest of the pile is massive. Moving on. To the reviews:

Taylor’s Version by Stephanie Burt*

Cover of Taylor's Version

I’m going to be honest and my most listened to album last month was the new Taylor Swift album. What can I say, I’m a millennial who likes Swedish pop, so an upbeat Max Martin-produced album is totally my jam. And so I was interested to read this book, which is a critical appreciation of Swift’s work, written by a professor who runs a course on her at Harvard. And it was interesting, but I had two key problems with it: one, I’m not a big enough Swiftie that I’m able to remember all the songs off all the albums without going back and listening to them again, and two, I’m not across (American?) music terminology and theory to be able to understand all the technicalities of the music and composition that Burt is explaining. I need someone to play it to demonstrate it to get it – like the Switched On Pop guys did with The Life of a Showgirl the other week – and to really understand the points that are being made. But I think it may well work for other people more than it did for me.

From Russia with Love by Ian Fleming

Paperback copy of From Russia With Love

This was my purchase in the Penguin Pop-Up back in September and is only the second of the actual James Bond books that I’ve read. I’ve watched the Connery and Bond movies a lot, so it was really interesting to see what the original was and where the plot was changed to make it into a film – and there are a few changes here and they weren’t always what I expected. There’s actually not a lot of Bond here until fairly late on – it’s mostly about the Russian side of the plot, building up to the chase sequence as Bond tries to make his way back to Britain (with Tatiana in tow). As a book it is of its time, but if you’re familiar with all the issues of the movie series, you know what you’re letting yourself in for!

The Body in the Kitchen Garden by Paula Sutton*

Cover of The Body in the Kitchen Garden

After reading the first in the Hill House Vintage mystery series last year, I’m back to report in on the second, because I said that I would come and report back on a sequel if it came. This sees Daphne helping in the renovation of the local manor house after the return of the owner after years out of the country. But when an unidentified body is discovered in the garden, she’s drawn into another murder investigation. In the first book, I had the murderer pegged fairly early on but I thought that might be because it was a debut, but also because there was a lot of series set up going on, so the mystery couldn’t be as complex as a result. But this didn’t have all that set up to do and I had the victim’s identity and the murderer worked out as early (if not earlier). And that’s a shame because I still really like the main characters and the setting. It’s just not got enough happening or complexity for me. Hey ho.

And that’s your lot for this month, as a reminder, the Books of the Week were: The Ghost Hunter’s Guide to Solving a Murder; What You Are Looking For is in the Library; Red Land, Black Land and I Shop, Therefore I Am. The Recommendsdays were a Halloween preview, mysteries set in theatres and Novelised Real People II

Book of the Week

Book of the Week: What You Are Looking for is in the Library

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Hello everyone. Apologies for the slightly blurry photo – I was finishing this one late night on Sunday, and haven’t been home in daylight to improve this. These things happen. Anway…

What You Are Looking for is in the Library is the stories of a series of people who visit a library in Tokyo and receive book recommendations from Sayuri Komachi, the enigmatic librarian who works there. Each of them is struggling with something in their lives, and although they don’t really tell her that, she senses what the recommendation is that they need. Each chapter follows the person receiving the advice, so you don’t actually see that much of Sayuri – just when they visit her in the library.

This is quite quiet and low stakes, but it’s immensely satisfying and soothing, and I loved seeing little glimpses of the people we had already met in the subsequent chapters. I read this in about 24 hours – starting fairly late on Saturday evening and finishing later than I should have been awake the night before the early train on Sunday and it still almost felt like it was over too quickly. I would happily read a sequel, but so far I can’t see that there is one, although this has been so successful that another one of Michiko Aoyama’s books, The Healing Hippo of Hinode Park, has been published in English already, with another, Hot Chocolate on Thursday, coming early next year although interestingly they both have different translators from this one.

What You Are Looking for is in the Library should be really easy to get hold of – it’s sold a tonne of copies and I’ve seen it all over the bookshops. And of course it’s also on Kindle and Kobo.

Happy Reading!

Book of the Week, non-fiction

Book of the Week: Red Land, Black Land

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Considering how busy last week was, I actually had choices for this week’s BotW, which was a bit of surprise to me, but these things happen and it required some serious thinking to work out what to pick. And hard thinking is tiring. So in the end I went with my first instinct. Whether that will work out in the end, who knows. Anyway…

Red Land, Black Land is Barbara Mertz’s social history of Egypt. It takes you through the daily life of an Ancient Egyptian, although perhaps unsurprisingly considering that most of what we know about them is from their tombs it tends towards the end of their lives and death!

Those of you who have been around here for a while will know that although I love history, it is rare that I venture before the Middle Ages and if push comes to shove, I would say that I’m most interested in the period after 1750*. So why did I venture more than a thousand years before my usual area of interest? Well Barbara Mertz is the real name of Elizabeth Peters, author of the Amelia Peabody and Vicky Bliss series, who did a PhD in Egyptology in the early 1950s and published this and a second book, Temples, Tombs and Hieroglyphics in the 1960s. They have remained in print ever since (having both been revised a couple of times – including in the case of Red Land, Black Land in 2008, which is when the audio book version that I listened to is from.

This is very much an introductory prime, written in an accessible, chatty style. I can imagine it being on the preliminary reading lists for all manner of courses on Egyptology, to get people into the swing of it before they go on to read the drier, more academic texts. In fact in many ways it’s got the same vibes as Ian Mortimer’s Time Traveller’s Guide series (which I also listened to on audio). And if you’ve read the Amelia Peabody series you can see where some of the inspiration for the various plots came from as well as spotting the various real life figures that popped up in that series (Theodore Davis, Arthur Weigel et al) as their discoveries and tombs are referenced.

Your mileage on this may vary depending on how much you like your history books with asides. I really like that (well when it’s an author whose voice I like!) and I found the audio book experience for this a real delight. I listened to the whole thing across about four days, and liked it so much I’ve bought Temples, Tombs and Hieroglyphics in audio too!

Red Land, Black Land is available as an audio book and as a paperback in its current revision, but not on Kindle or Kobo. If you’re tempted to buy secondhand, pay attention to the age and edition that you’re looking at – as from looking at the reviews on Goodreads it would seem that it did change and update a lot over time – especially given that there’s 30 years between the last two updates and scholarship can move a lot in that time!

Happy reading!

*and if you look at the history modules that I did for my degree you will see this born out!

Book of the Week, memoirs, new releases, non-fiction

Book of the Week: I Shop, Therefore I Am

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Lets just take a moment for the fact that my pick this week is a book that came out last week so I am actually topical and sort of on time for once. Lets mark it, because it happens less often than it ought to, considering the number of advance copies I have of things!

Cover of I Shop, Therefore I A,m

I Shop, Therefore I Am is Mary Portas’s second memoir – I haven’t read the first, but I think this picks up where the first one ends – with Mary starting a new job in charge of window displays at Harvey Nichols. During her time there (which starts in the late 1980s), it transformed from a department store somewhere mostly patronised by older ladies from the Home Counties and in the shadow of their neighbour down the road Harrods, to a headline making store at the cutting edge of the fashion industry.

I grew up watching Absolutely Fabulous (not quite when if first came out, but not *that* long after that) and part of the joy of reading this is getting to see the impact that that show had on the store. But it’s also fascinating to see the mechanics of how the shop worked at a time which (in hindsight) was basically the heyday of the high street. I worked in retail for my first Saturday job was in a clothing store, but the behind the scenes of that was nothing like this – I was at a much lower level but also the clientele was very, very different. I also really liked Mary Portas’s writing style and her voice. She balances the day to day of what she was doing with fun gossipy insights into high fashion and celebrity. And she also seems incredibly normal and down to earth with it that it’s easy to forget that she was moving in really high powered circles until she suddenly mentions how upset they were when Princess Diana died because they all saw her in the store all the time, or when she gets Naomi Campbell to do her instore fashion show.

This is a really good read that would work whether you remember the time that Mary is talking about or not, but I think you’ll get different things out of it depending on whether you remember the time before internet shopping or not! It would also be a great Christmas book for someone who is interested in fashion.

My copy came from NetGalley, but it came out last week and I’m expecting to see it in all the bookshops ahead of the festive rush, especially because it made a bunch of the anticipated book lists earlier in the year. And of course it’s also in Kindle and Kobo.

books

Book of the Week: Breakneck

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Happy Tuesday everyone and today I have a non-fiction pick for you – and it’s a book that’s only come out in the last month or so, so I’m even timely for once!

Dan Wang is a Chinese-Canadian, who now works in academia in the US as a research fellow but who was previous a China analyst looking at the country’s technological capabilities while living and working in Hong Kong, Beijing and Shanghai. Breakneck is his attempt to put all of this work into one place and to look at the differences between China and the US. He sees the US and China as fundamentally similar in some ways – but that China is an engineering state and the US is a lawyerly one. He says this isn’t a grand theory to explain everything but a framework to put the recent past in and to help understand what might happen next.

I found this really fascinating and illuminating and really liked Wang’s framework as a lens to view China and its relationship with the US through. I’ve spent a lot of time reading about China and trying to understand the current geopolitical situation as part of my day job so on a macro level this is interesting to me. But on a micro level, my little sister and her now husband moved to China in the summer of 2019 and I was really looking forward to visiting them and seeing China – and then the pandemic happened and they were stuck where they were and we were stuck where we were. They came back in 2021 and a lot of the stories that they have told me from their time in Beijing fit in with what is being set out here.

This is a really thought provoking book that is also a glimpse at China beyond the big cities that people outside of China have heard of. I don’t know enough about China to be able to analyse this on a scholarly level (duh!) but as a casual reader and consumer of world news it made a lot of sense to me!

My copy of Breakneck came via NetGalley, but it’s out now and hopefully should be relatively easy to get hold of if you’re in a bookshop with a decent non-fiction section. And it’s also on Kindle and Kobo.

Happy Reading!

Book of the Week

Book of the Week: A Fine Line Between Stupid and Clever

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At this point I can’t tell if this is going to be a shock for you if you saw the list yesterday? I mean I feel it probably shouldn’t be because it was only Sunday that I wrote about how much I love books about behind the scenes in hollywood and this is a book about how a somewhat legendary movie got made.

If you don’t know what Spinal Tap is, I’m not sure where you’ve been, but they’re a fake rock band created by Rob Reiner, Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer, and This is Spinal Tap was the first mockumentary. It’s the thing that all the others are based on and the source of various pop culture reference to the point where if you see it now it’s hard to imagine how different it was.

Most of this book is the history of how the film got made and what happened next – when a fictional band started become real – from appearing at the Freddie Mercury tribute concert to putting out albums. Rob Reiner has done most of the work on this part of the book and it is to tie in with the fortieth birthday of the movie (last year), the fact that the quartet have got the rights back to the movie and property again and that there’s a sequel which is in movie theatres now. We can gloss over whether the sequel was good idea or not (the reviews suggest maybe not) but it’s a really fun read to see how the movie got made – but also what a collaborative effort it was and what a pivotal role in all of the stars lives.

Now flip the book over and the other end is a mock oral history of the band written by the quartet in their characters. This has some funny moments, but it’s not as good as the other end is. But it’s also less than half the length of the other bit so it doesn’t outstay its welcome!

My copy came from Big Green Books who look like they may have a few signed ones left, but I think it’s going to be pretty easy to find normal copies in the shops if you want it. It’s on Kindle and Kobo too, but priced accordingly considering it’s a hardback release. There’s also an audiobook read/performed by the four of them. And if you haven’t watched This is Spinal Tap, you really should!

Book of the Week, cozy crime, detective, first in series, mystery, reviews

Book of the Week: The Last Supper

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It’s been more than a month since I picked a murder mystery for book of the week. Can you believe it? I can’t – and even when I went back and checked I still sort of didn’t believe it. But it’s true, so who says there’s no variety in my reading. And there’s more murder mysteries coming tomorrow in the Quick Reviews, but first let’s talk about The Last Supper.

Prudence Bulstrode is a retired TV chef. But when one of her former rivals is found dead in the garden of a house where she was catering a shooting weekend, Prudence is called in to replace her. Farleigh Manor is notorious for an unsolved murder from a century ago, but when Prudence arrives she is soon convinced that Deirdre’s death wasn’t a tragic accident but murder. And while her granddaughter, who she brought along to keep her out of getting into (even more) trouble starts investigating the old murder, Prudence sets out to solve the new one.

Rosemary Shrager is a chef who has been a semi regular on British TV for about 20 years now and before that she ran her own catering company, so the setting for this falls very much into her area of expertise and it shows. I personally have never been on a shooting weekend, but it very much felt like she had and all is those details really worked. I also found this quite humorous – with the tension and generation gap between Prudence and Suki, but couldn’t work whether that was deliberate or not. But does it matter if it was or wasn’t? The only disappointment to me was the eventual solution to the murder, which without giving spoilers about what precisely happened, I didn’t quite feel like the reader had all of the pieces for it to work as well as I wanted it to.

But it was a fun read that I finished in an afternoon and evening and I will definitely keep an eye out for the sequel (there are two now) to see if the humour was deliberate!

I bought my copy of The Last Supper secondhand and I’ve seen it in the shops fairly regularly. And it’s also on Kindle and Kobo.

Happy Reading!